dkirschner's Crysis (PC)

[May 28, 2011 01:45:39 AM]

Crysis is one of the best-looking games I've ever played and it's over 3.5 years old! The #1 thing I'd read about it is how much it pushes the visual envelope on PC, and I can vouch for it. It does come at the cost of performance though, which is too bad, but I suppose people with ridiculously high-end PCs can smile real big. This PC is a top-of-the-liner from late 2009, runs everything on maximum, and handled Crysis on High (out of Very High) most of the time, but at the end I even had to turn it down to Medium, and even then it still stuttered like crazy. There's just so many explosions and epic things happening on the screen at once. I can't imagine what Crysis 2 looks like, or what kind of computer you need to run it, ha. And not to ruin story, but the level in the alien ship was the single most incredible looking level I've ever gazed at, ever.

I have to draw obvious comparisons between Crysis and both Far Cry and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare/Black Ops. First of all, Crysis looks a lot like Far Cry. Both take place on jungle islands, and the look of the games are real similar. In Far Cry, you're fighting against some government/guerillas/don't remember, and then you end up having to deal with aliens. In Crysis, you're a special ops agent fighting against the North Koreans, and then you end up having to deal with...aliens. There's not much in the way of story, so the focus is on action, action, action.

The most unique thing about Crysis is your nanosuit. Instead of loading you out with guns only, your suit makes you a super soldier with its 4 modes: strength, speed, armor, and cloaking. You can swap between them on the fly as the situation warrants. Mostly, I found the situation rarely warranted any specific one, so it's up to the player to be creative. Strength reduces recoil on your weapon, lets you punch things real hard and break stuff, and lets you jump real high, which was good for getting a height advantage. Speed makes you super fast, which is good for closing in quickly on enemies (then switch to strength and bam!) or quickly escaping to cover. Armor I used on some hefty enemies, and it reduces damage taken. And stealth, ever my favorite, makes you invisible a short time, and invisibility breaks when you fire a weapon or your suit's energy runs out. You can't abuse any of the powers because of the suit's limited and rechargeable energy, so I had to think and plan a bit. I used stealth the majority of the time, lured enemies near me, and picked them off one by one with a silenced gun.

Guns are very standard fare, nothing unique there.

That really is the gist of the game. It's very intense, which is why I bring up the CoD series, so intense in fact that I almost played the entire thing in one sitting, and would have if I didn't get stuck/frustrated at the end.

I do have a few gripes. One is that there were 0 boss fights until the very end. It made the pacing feel a bit off, not monotonous or anything, because the objectives kept on coming, and the whole game was epic all along, but singular battles just didn't happen, I guess because there's no setup for a 'bad guy' in the story besides the aliens and the North Korean general (which I'm hardly calling a boss fight because it was so easy and mundane). The singular things in the game were events instead of boss fights. For example, one mission you have to call an airstrike on a communications ship in a harbor, the climax of the overarching mission to secure the harbor and free up communications so the military can advance and find the general. You call it in and this awesome bombing scene happens with the boat capsizing and sinking into the water. There's another part with a crumbling mountain, rocks falling all around you, that was very cool.

Another gripe are the bugs. The mission to call an air strike on the ship, after you call the air strike, you get a call to 'hold off enemy air units' until your allies can fly in. When I played there were no air units. My choppers came in, one landed (and opened fire into the sky forever), and the other two just flew around. I ran around like 30 minutes, loaded, reloaded, couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong, why they weren't landing and why I couldn't do anything. I went online for help and found tons of people posting about a plethora of bugs in the game, and on that mission in general. Someone said the enemy chopper is about 5 miles up in the sky and you can see with binoculars. Sure enough, there it was, firing rockets into the air (ah, and that's what the grounded chopper of mine was shooting at!), but I couldn't shoot it, too high. Another person said instead of the boat sinking, it just did barrel rolls forever. Another person said they kept falling through the ship's deck. But many, many people were asking how to make friendly choppers land. I took advice and loaded an earlier save, played some of the level again. Same thing. I couldn't find an answer, but I noticed that when I loaded it back, a chopper comes to harass me before I board the ship. Choppers in Crysis usually fly away if you shoot back at them or ignore them, and that's what this one had done. Instead, I took it on, blew it up, then another came, and I called the airstrike on the ship while the chopper was still active. A-ha! Now the event proceeded normally, as I kept the chopper occupied until friendlies came and helped bring it down.

Another annoying thing is at the end, you get this TAC gun that is supposed to auto-lock onto the last boss, which, when you go on deck then, appears to be a giant spider thing. The damn gun wouldn't lock. This is what made me quit playing last night. I looked it up after trying to make it lock for like 30 minutes, and turns out you're not supposed to use it on that boss. You have to use regular guns on that boss. Then why do I have this TAC gun now?! And why don't they tell me just to use regular bullets?! Because, hey, if you give a player a giant new gun, they will try and use it on the first giant enemy they see, and it really doesn't make sense not to be able to, especially when said gun has infinite ammo. Okay, so kill the spider boss, then a giant ship comes out of the ocean and I have to kill its turrets. The TAC gun won't autolock again! I had read this is the last boss and the TAC gun is for the last boss. Oh, the TAC gun is ONLY for shooting its heart, and you have to use regular ammo against the turrets. So irritating! I finally got it right and brought it down.

So my gripe is that like 20% of my play time in Crysis was trying to get around a bug and trying to use the TAC gun when I secretly wasn't supposed to be using it. If the rest of the game weren't absolutely stellar, I would be less forgiving, but the rest of the game was absolutely stellar.